So we should be updating the live site in a week and then again in a month. We are going to cover the Lehigh Valley, and Philadelphia and then New York City. At this moment, we are writing the five minute quiz for votersa dn politicians to take. What questions do you think we should ask?

Big news! This Resource Philly Map project, formerly named Resource Awareness Philly, is moving again, and fast. We have a new prototype, and we're looking for more collaborators. Please reach out on Slack under the channel #resource-philly-map.

Build partnerships: The Office of Homeless Services in Philadelphia has indicated interest in generating a user base for this app, and we are building partnerships with local nonprofits serving homeless citizens as well as the Free Library.

[On March 20th] I visited the students at Walter B Saul High School to talk about their participation in the PHLASK Project and sustainability thinking. We watched “The Story of Stuff” on YouTube, which describes the current wasteful life cycle of consumerism and the need to shift to a more sustainable system for producing, consuming and reusing products. (If you haven’t watched it, I’d highly recommend it!) We then contextualized this with thinking about the life cycle of single-use water bottles and the comparative life cycle impacts vs simply drinking water from the tap. I think the students were pretty engaged at points and showed genuine concern for the issues.

For next steps, the students are going to start creating marketing materials and strategies to reach out to businesses. We did an interesting class survey to measure the students’ own water drinking habits, which I’m also hoping they will extend to the wider school community so that we can get even more data. We also left it a bit open-ended so that they can potentially approach this project from other creative angles.

If anyone is interested in working with the students directly, please reach out and let me know! The class’ teacher, Greg Smith, is very receptive to new ideas and additional ways to give hands-on experience to the students.

Plenty of Water II

Last year around this time, we had a little happy hour celebration at Plenty Café when they became the first Private-Shared point on the map. Since we have a growing team, it might be fun to have another happy hour so we can all hang out and learn more about one another. It could also be an opportunity to welcome other individuals to contribute ideas / help with other project vectors. Just wanted to put that on the radar so we could consider doing it sometime in April (United By Blue as the 2nd private-shared location could be a cool opportunity)

As always, we welcome anyone to the project who would like to get involved and help out. If you see something that strikes your interest or have other ideas, please reach out and join the #PHLASK channel on Slack.

We are currently trying to decide priorities for this year. Do we focus on local elections in a few larger cities or do we focus on 2020? Doing local elections requires a different set of tools than federal ones and different research/networking. we can get information on national candidates eaily, but there are over 10,000 local election boards, and we just don't have enough time to contact them all. So we can spend a lot of time trying to build tools and relationships with other organizations that can do the footwork for us, or we can pick a few cities, or we can focus on 2020.

Thoughts?

Because a lot of people vote along party lines, Votewise.net is most useful for primaries - which unfortunately cuts down our lead time.

You can check out the our progress at our test site http://162.243.165.113:6080 or you can see the live tools at VoteWise.net